The Volunteers reciprocated these ill feelings. They believed that they would immerse themselves in a culture in ways never dreamed of by U.S. diplomats. The Volunteers saw themselves as the true ambassadors for the United States even while they asserted their independence. They took pains to try to explain to the people around them that they had nothing to do with the U.S. embassy.
The subject was discussed in the early days at a meeting in the State Department between Sargent Shriver and G. Mennen Williams, the former governor of Michigan appointed by Kennedy as the first assistant secretary of state for African affairs. An account of the meeting survives in the files of the National Archives.
“There is one minor point of irritation, however, that I would like to mention,” said Williams. “Our FSOs [foreign service officers] tell us that the Volunteers think they are poison and a bunch of cookie pushers. I want more cordial relations . . . . Do you think your Volunteers should never go near the embassy?”
Shriver was diplomatic in what amounted to a putdown. “We don’t say there is anything wrong with the official American community,” he said, “but we do say to our Volunteers that the more they work with Americans and the more they enter into American life, the more difficult and less effective their job will be.”
Sometimes the tension was ludicrous. In 1965, I called on U.S. ambassador Leland Barrows at his embassy in Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, to discuss the work of the Peace Corps. In the midst of our conversation, he burst into a monologue. He had one searing issue on his mind.
“I’ve heard,” the ambassador said, “that a Volunteer has accused some member on the embassy staff of buying forty-four jars of Skippy peanut butter in Victoria [the port of West Cameroon, the English-speaking region where most Volunteers worked]. Now there isn’t any Skippy peanut butter for the Volunteers. I suppose Shriver will hear about this soon at one of those big board meetings in Washington. And everyone will be talking about how we bought up the Skippy peanut butter.
“First of all, I want to tell you that it simply is not true. I’ve checked and no member of my staff bought that peanut butter. But even if he did—do you realize there are fifty-five children on this embassy post? They certainly have a right to Skippy peanut butter ahead of your Volunteers.
“If your Volunteers want peanut butter so badly, why don’t they go out and make it? They’re Peace Corps Volunteers. I can give them a recipe.”
Ambassador Barrows astounded me with the vehemence of his concern for a matter so trivial—an incident, in fact, that not a single Volunteer had mentioned during my four weeks of interviewing in Cameroon. The ambassador’s peanut butter outburst, etched with so much sarcasm, came out of a long-simmering resentment with the Peace Corps.
In his fifth year in Cameroon, Ambassador Barrows, a career foreign service officer, was near retirement after many years with both AID and the State Department. In his view, the Peace Corps had a penchant for showy ways that often tried to upstage the embassy.
The Peace Corps, for example, encouraged the staff to live in comfortable but far from ostentatious homes. Shriver wanted Volunteers, who often lived in spare quarters, to feel at ease when they dropped by the home of their country director. While he did not expect staff and their families to be housed in mud huts, he wanted them to live at least a notch or two below the level of the U.S. embassy staff.
It rankled Ambassador Barrows that Larry Williams, the first Peace Corps director, and his wife lived in a modest house close to the center of town rather than a large home farther out. When Williams’s tour was over, Shriver proposed Bill Dretzin, a New York businessman, as the replacement. The ambassador cabled his concurrence but warned that the Dretzins, with their three children, would need a larger house. Despite this, the Dretzins upset the ambassador by moving into the Williams house.
Ambassador Barrows was still complaining about Peace Corps staff housing more than five years later when he sat for an interview for the oral history program of the John F. Kennedy Library. “Oh, you’d get this ostentatious virtue, this vicarious austerity and that sort of thing among them,” he said, discussing the Peace Corps staff. “You’d have one director who’d insist that he had to have a certain kind of house . . . . Then the next man would find the house a little too fancy, and he wanted to move somewhere else. They were all trying to fit the image.”
“I always felt,” he went on, “that the Peace Corps, particularly under Shriver, was operated more with the American public in mind than with the needs of the countries that we were helping . . . . I suppose that the general atmosphere that the Peace Corps brought gave me as much feeling of skepticism about the [Kennedy] administration as any other one thing I can think of because it was largely governed by image-making.”
Over the years, this kind of resentment eased as the Peace Corps slipped out of the public spotlight, U.S. foreign service officers became more familiar with Peace Corps work, and former Volunteers began entering the ranks of the foreign service. By October 2009, the official Peace Corps Web site listed two assistant secretaries of state and fifteen ambassadors or former ambassadors as ex–Peace Corps Volunteers. Most ambassadors and Peace Corps country directors could work out a relationship of mutual respect that allowed the Peace Corps a great deal of independence.
But there were ambassadors who still chafed over Peace Corps independence. In rare cases, as in the case of Ambassador Retzer, this brought on bitter confrontation. Yet as Deputy Director Jody Olsen and other Peace Corps officials acknowledged, there was an ambiguity over the relationship. Ambassador Retzer did not fashion his authority out of thin air. Like all other ambassadors, he received instructions from the secretary of state about the Peace Corps and instructions from the president about the ambassador’s authority, and the two messages differed in tone and substance.
The instructions during Retzer’s tenure came in a cable from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to all ambassadors that followed the traditional line of the State Department about dealing with the Peace Corps. Rice, in fact, quoted the guiding principle of Dean Rusk, the secretary of state when the Peace Corps was formed in 1961: “The Peace Corps is not an instrument of foreign policy because to make it so would rob it of its contribution to foreign policy.”
Rice therefore asked ambassadors “to provide the Peace Corps with as much autonomy and flexibility in its day-to-day operations as possible, so long as this does not conflict with U.S. objectives and policies.” Since the Peace Corps, as a grassroots, people-to-people organization, needed to be accessible to the people of the country, Rice told ambassadors to “give favorable consideration to requests from the Peace Corps to maintain its offices at locations separate from the [U.S.] Mission and thus preserve this autonomy.”
As far as staffing was concerned, Rice said the selection of a country director was “a decision reserved to the [Peace Corps] director exclusively.” The Peace Corps, however, did welcome the ambassador’s assessment of the performance of the country director and the rest of the staff, she said.
While the instructions from Secretary Rice contained some loopholes, the cable should have persuaded Ambassador Retzer to leave the Peace Corps motor pool, medical staff, and country director alone. But Retzer, like all other ambassadors, also had a letter of instructions signed by President George W. Bush.
This letter from Bush, following the traditional line of presidential letters to ambassadors, stated clearly, “As Chief of Mission, you have full responsibility for the direction, coordination, and supervision of all United States Government executive branch employees” in Tanzania. No exception was made for the Peace Corps.
“I ask that you review programs, personnel, and funding levels regularly,” Bush went on, “and ensure that all agencies attached to your Mission do likewise . . . . In your reviews, should you feel staffing to be either excessive or inadequate to the performance of priority Mission goals and
objectives, I urge you to initiate staffing changes in accordance with established procedures.”
Ambassador Retzer, a political appointee, obviously decided that the letter from the president was more important than the cable from the secretary of state. Using the presidential letter as his guide, Retzer could justify his concern about the Peace Corps drivers, medical staff, and country director.
Olsen, who was deputy director during the Retzer controversy, says the traditional presidential letter creates “a very ambiguous situation,” because the letter “is not in complete harmony” with the understanding that the Peace Corps has with the State Department about its independence.
“Almost all ambassadors respect the normal processes,” she says, but “occasionally there is an outlier ambassador who takes the letter too seriously.” When that happens, Olsen goes on, “there is only so much that can be done because of the letter.” Even the State Department’s “hands are tied” by the presidential letter.
This jurisdictional tension between an ambassador and the Peace Corps is just another side to the ambiguity about the place of the Peace Corps in U.S. foreign policy. Although Rusk’s dictum about the Peace Corps not taking part in U.S. foreign policy is quoted often, the Peace Corps Act puts it much differently.
Under the Act, the president is authorized “to assure coordination of Peace Corp[s] activities with other activities of the United States Government in each country” and the Secretary of State is authorized to supervise Peace Corps programs to make sure “the foreign policy of the United States is best served thereby.”
For the most part, the Peace Corps operated independently throughout its half-century of history. But from time to time, administrations enlisted the Peace Corps into campaigns of foreign policy—the expansion of programs in Latin America to counter the influence of Fidel Castro, the influx of Volunteers into Honduras as compensation for harboring the contras, and the rush into Eastern Europe to spread capitalism are obvious examples. In the case of the Dominican Republic in 1965, foreign policy and Peace Corps independence clashed in bitter confusion when many Volunteers denounced the invasion by U.S. Marines.
Peace Corps programs often faltered when inflated or distorted for foreign policy ends. But there was no way to escape this tension. In a memoir written in 1971, Brent Ashabranner, a former deputy director, proposed that the Peace Corps be run by a foundation financed by Congress but completely independent of the U.S. government. The proposal came out of his concern about Volunteers chafing that they represented a U.S. government fighting an unpopular war in Vietnam.
Ashabranner’s idea never attracted support. It is hard to imagine Congress ever appropriating several hundred million dollars for a Peace Corps completely out of the government’s control. Faced with this difficulty, even Ashabranner concluded, “Meanwhile, I think that a Peace Corps as part of government is much better than no Peace Corps at all.
A few words about the Central Intelligence Agency: from the beginning, it was clear that the Peace Corps would be dogged by suspicions and accusations that many of its Volunteers were disguised agents of the CIA. This came from communist propagandists and nationalist hotheads. Even American expatriates in the capitals liked to gossip and point fingers of suspicion. The Peace Corps seemed such a logical place to hide an agent.
Sargent Shriver knew that if any cases of infiltration by the CIA were proven and publicized, the Peace Corps would probably be destroyed. Few countries would let Volunteers in if they thought with good reason that some were agents. Shriver therefore solicited and received assurances from President Kennedy, his brother-in-law, that he had instructed the CIA to keep its hands off the Peace Corps.
Neither Kennedy nor Shriver trusted the CIA, though, and both pestered it to make sure it was obeying the president. In 1962, Stanley Grogan, assistant director of the CIA, reported to the White House that “CIA has nothing whatever to do with the Peace Corps.” In 1963, Shriver telephoned Kennedy and said he had heard rumors “that some of our friends over in the Central Intelligence Agency might think they’re smarter than anyone else and that they’re trying to stick fellows in the Peace Corps.” The president told Shriver to phone CIA Deputy Director Richard Helms and warn him that the president does not want any CIA agent in the Peace Corps, “and if they are there, let’s get them out.”
Over the years, the CIA renewed vows of noninterference, and there has not been a single known case of a CIA agent serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer or a member of the Peace Corps staff. At a meeting in Havana, Fidel Castro, discovering that Senator Dodd had once been a Volunteer in the Caribbean, told Dodd that “despite rumors that have flowed from all sources, we never once have had one piece of specific information to link any Peace Corps Volunteer . . . with any foreign intelligence operation.”
In 1996, John M. Deutch, the CIA director, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that there never had been a case of the CIA using a Volunteer as an agent. But he still opposed legislation that would have prevented the CIA from using Volunteers, as well as journalists and clergy, if it saw fit. Deutch said that CIA policy was not to use Volunteers, but the agency still wanted the right to waive this policy if necessary. This waiver would occur, he testified, only under even more “circumscribed circumstances” than waivers for the use of journalists and clergy. Congress never passed the legislation.
The Peace Corps has set down several policies to allay suspicions. Since the beginning, the Peace Corps refused to accept any former CIA employee as a Volunteer. Former employees of other U.S. intelligence operations, like army or navy intelligence, were eligible, but only ten years or more after their service there had ended.
The Peace Corps struggled to stamp out any hint of association with the CIA. In the late 1960s, the CIA station chief in Tanzania, a flamboyant and affable man, invited a new Peace Corps staffer to go sailing. The U.S. embassy in Dar es Salaam was an important listening post because southern African guerilla groups headquartered in Tanzania and because the Chinese communists, with whom the United States had no diplomatic relations, ran several important foreign aid projects in the country. During the sailing, the CIA chief did not grill the Peace Corps about anything. But when word of the outing reached Washington, Jack Hood Vaughn, the Peace Corps director at the time, was furious. He phoned the staffer, berated him for the mistake, and made it clear there was no room for that kind of fraternization.
The Tanzanian government in those days did not allow most U.S. diplomats to travel to its southern border, where guerillas were launching raids into the Portuguese colony of Mozambique. Paul Sack, the Peace Corps country director, had no trouble obtaining permission to visit his Volunteers in the area.
Yet he never shared what he found out with the embassy.
Since the Peace Corps insisted it was not involved in intelligence gathering, he was not going to gather or deliver any. Whenever the question of Mozambique came up at meetings of the ambassador, senior diplomats and the heads of U.S. agencies in Tanzania, Sack recalls, “I kept my mouth shut.”
An incident in Bolivia in 2007 illustrated how suspicions can multiply and then be bent for use by both a foreign government and the U.S. government. Relations between the United States and Bolivia had frayed after the 2005 election of President Evo Morales, a leftist ally of Venezuela’s anti-American president, Hugo Chávez. While briefing thirty Volunteers in July about safety, the U.S. embassy security officer asked them to report to the embassy if they came across any Cuban or Venezuelan doctors and other workers in Bolivia. Doreen Salazar, the deputy director of the Peace Corps program in Bolivia, interrupted, told the Volunteers not to comply with the request, and then complained to the embassy.
“We made it clear to the embassy that this was an inappropriate request,” Salazar told ABC News later, “and they agreed.” But their agreement did not muzzle the security officer. Four months later, he made the same request to a Ful
bright scholar. Since the Fulbright program has the same policy on intelligence as the Peace Corps, the Fulbright scholar angrily and publicly accused the embassy of trying to persuade him to spy for them. An embarrassed State Department official in Washington said, “We take this very seriously and want to stress that this is not in any way our policy.”
It is well known, especially overseas, that two or three CIA agents, including the station chief, are usually hidden in every U.S. embassy as members of the staff. That made it easy for some Bolivians to assume that the intelligence requested from the Peace Corps and the Fulbright scholar was supposed to end up with the CIA. Indeed, the Peace Corps/Fulbright incident was quickly seized on by the Bolivians as evidence of U.S. bad faith. Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca said, “Any U.S. government use of their students or volunteers to provide intelligence represents a grave threat to Bolivia’s sovereignty.”
But the United States used the incident as well. After opposition rioting erupted against Morales in 2008, the Bolivian president expelled U.S. ambassador Philip Goldberg, accusing him of conspiring with the opposition. The Peace Corps then shut down its programs in Bolivia, transporting all 113 Volunteers out of the country in cargo planes.
Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon said that the Volunteers had been evacuated for their safety. Shannon told the Associated Press, “Remember, the Bolivians . . . said they thought the Peace Corps was part of a larger intelligence network that they thought we had constructed in Bolivia. Those kind of statements we find very worrisome.” In short, the United States was saying that the Bolivian reaction to the intelligence gathering brouhaha had forced it to evacuate the Peace Corps.
But several Volunteers believed their programs had been shut down as retaliation for the ouster of Goldberg. “Peace Corps unfortunately has become another weapon in the U.S. diplomatic arsenal,” Sarah Nourse wrote in an e-mail to fellow Volunteers.
When the World Calls Page 26